For more than two centuries, a period that lasted longer than the ancient Pax Romana, the city of Florence was the center of the political, financial, and—more importantly—artistic life of the Christian West. Unlike its imperial predecessor, this more modern hegemony was due to neither the efficiency of an authoritarian administration nor a military power. The pre-eminence of Florence was based on the almost miraculous vibrancy, inventiveness, and creative energy of a closely knit mercantile community whose innovations and accomplishments went on to bear fruit ever further beyond the city’s borders and to transform early modern Europe with ideas, processes, and products.

By the beginning of the seventeenth century, however, other forces and circumstances spelled decline. This downward spiral continued uninterrupted through a long-lived Medici grand-ducal dynasty and finally ended with the incorporation of the independent Tuscan state into the nascent Italian nation in 1861. It was during the decades following unification that Florence lived its last moment on the world stage. As if preserved in amber, the art-filled city was “rediscovered” by an international coterie of late Romantic artists, writers, poets, and scholars as well as the wealthy aesthetes who thrived in their company. Waves of the European, Russian, and American upper-crust settled in the palaces and villas in which Florence abounds, imbuing the city with an avant-garde, cosmopolitan character far